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Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

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Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#411

Post by jgwil2 »

dboreham wrote: post #404
killerdhmo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every sin…

> use 3rd party SaaS services for everything

OTOH didn't Facebook just demonstrate why building everything in-house is dangerous?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#412

Post by maxerickson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #390
maxerickson wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the relevant analogy be operating income? It's usually not a problem for a business to incur a short term operating loss.

"Solvency", writ large, is ability to service debts. It's not quite as simple as cash-on-hand, turnover, or profitability. Start-ups without revenues or net profits may be solvent if investment capital is available, premised on future profitability or a viable exit strategy. But it's fairly strongly related.

For a plane, solvency would be airworthiness, not altitude.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#413

Post by dredmorbius »

maxerickson wrote: post #412
dredmorbius wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solvency", writ large, is ability to service debts. It's not quite as simple as cash-on-hand, turnover, or profitability. Start-ups without revenues or net profits may be solvent if investment capital is available, premised on future profitability or a viable exit strategy. But it's fairly strongly related.

For a plane, solvency would be airworthiness, not altitude.

That's not the way I'm picturing it.

Airworthiness is more an overall assessment of risk.

A substantially compromised aircraft, with expert piloting and favourable weather, can still land successfully.

A fully-airworthy aircraft experiencing CFIT won't. Nor will one flown into unanticipated adverse conditions such as violent weather, volcanic ash, or wind shear.

And of course, a sufficiently crippled craft cannot be landed successfully no matter what.

(An additional case is of a landing with partial survival of passengers and crew. We'll omit that.)

Airworthiness increases he probability of a successful flight. It's neither strictly necessary, nor sufficient. It is part of the overall risk assessment, effectively a creditworthiness rating.

An airworthiness certificate is a specific certification of such airworthiness.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#414

Post by whynotmaybe »

jgwil2 wrote: post #411
dboreham wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every sin…

> use 3rd party SaaS services for everything OTOH didn't Facebook just demonstrate why building everything in-house is dangerous?

If you use a saas for login, one for business process A, one for business process B, C, D,... if just one of these fail, you might be at risk of losing business and huge amount of money for something you have no control on.

You are lowering you cost but by doing so, you are increasing your risk.

Furthermore, by using external saas, some business will have a tendency to get rid of some IT people to "really" save on cost which means you'll lose manpower for when something happens.

Software development has changed in the last decade and now everybody knows that they have to take failure into account when building software. Chaos Monkey opened the eyes of a lot of It people.

There should be some "MBA" level chaos monkey solution.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#415

Post by ghaff »

toyg wrote: post #366
TeMPOraL wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight. You can see how this is a problem, right? This essentially means the market is not working as it should - instead of improving quality of service, it makes people absorb the bad experience, ad infinitum. The market is not able to deliver feedback to the companies, who instead r…

> This essentially means the market is not working as it should Actually the market works just fine: it transfers price pressures efficiently across all participants - including human beings. It's society that doesn't work anymore, because it has now lost any meaning of 'value' beyond monetary terms for most of the population. Most consumers now cannot choose not to minimize expenditure: either because they cannot af…

>Most consumers now cannot choose not to minimize expenditure:

Leaving aside flying private--which is a whole different magnitude of cost--consumers can absolutely choose to pay more to insulate themselves from much of the unpleasantness of flying. Doesn't help much when flights are canceled or delayed of course but you have Pre-Check, airline lounges, business class seating, etc. which do generally improve the experience.

But, yes, society in the aggregate does not value the better experience at what it would cost to deliver--certainly not to the point of effectively excluding a significant segment of the population from routine flying but, in the process, making it a more pleasant experience for others.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#416

Post by polartx »

drfxyjhdyfrhgc wrote: post #338
miles wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southwest Airlines, passengers claim different causes for cancellations https://www.khou.com/article/news/national/southwest-airline... > The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8. > Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate. > “I asked them specifically 'i…

Why downvote a link to a local news outlet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHOU

Bullet, meet messenger.

I was, at first, very skeptical that so many people would walk out of the their jobs in a seemingly organized way, until I heard about the PTO angle of the story.

I work at a company with “unlimited PTO” (because business leaders learned that they pay less with “unlimited” than they do with accrued). But in previous jobs, it was very common to accrue PTO (up to 2 to 3 weeks worth). Most employees would find it hard to get coverage or approval for taking time off, so their PTO would accrue until it maxed out. Anytime I was going to leave a job where I had banked PTO, I would take my time off, and then resign when I came back because if you leave with accrued PTO, they would pay it out, taxed as supplemental income, which is at a higher rate.

3 weeks is a common max accrual for folks that have worked somewhere longer than a year or two, and looking at the calendar, we’re almost exactly 3 weeks from November.

These workers are getting (PTO) paid to strike, plus they’re not breaking any rules, or committing to resigning (or being terminated due to COVID policy), yet. Three weeks to take a much needed break, speak their values, and not miss a check? Now that sounds more like human behavior.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#417

Post by SilasX »

brandmeyer wrote: post #400
cronix wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was a…

> And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise. Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply…

Heh, incidentally, there was a hospital that (reportedly) said, "okay sure, if you're swearing off all those other things you can claim a vaccine exemption":

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-...

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#418

Post by ghaff »

Barrin92 wrote: post #401
listenallyall wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well. All with an excellent safety record, especially in the past decade. If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR po…

>The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well As opposed to...? tons of cargo and millions of people are being moved around everywhere, welcome to the modern world. The US commercial flight industry sucks in the grand scheme of things mostly due to a lack of competitio…

I don't claim to know all the price/cost dynamics, but it's mostly the regional low-cost carriers (which people seem to generally hate except for their cheapness) that are cheap in Europe and Asia. Otherwise airfares are pretty similar to the US.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#419

Post by treespace88 »

silisili wrote: post #171
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

This COBOL shortage myth has been around since I was a kid. It wasn't true then, and isn't now. The entire problem is that they don't pay well for what is supposedly a rare resource. And nobody wants to learn a dead language for peanuts. Offer 500k/yr, and me and about 100 million other people will be learning COBOL starting tomorrow.

Also there are a ton of working programers that have some experience in cobol from school.

But everyone knows it’s a dead end. So yeah they need to pay very well to get the fixed they need.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#420

Post by MattRix »

roenxi wrote: post #396
Cederfjard wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would you be happy if in addition to vaccination and regular testing, regular antibody tests were also an alternative? And do you agree that this would also increase complexity (in my mind to questionable benefit)?

No, I wouldn't accept that approach either. But at least it would be focusing on the risk instead of being a status play. At the moment you're accepting a risk without knowing anyone's antibody titer at all. It says a lot about the situation that nobody is measuring it and nobody minds that it isn't being measured. People's susceptibility to COVID is barely in the conversation. A risk-based strategy is not being empl…

Of course everyone around you being vaccinated is safer and less risky for you (and for them as well). And sure there are other approaches that might be even more effective at reducing risk (like measuring antibodies), but that would also be much more complicated.
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